Harry the Poisonous Centipede’s Big Adventure

Suddenly he stopped. He’d caught a signal!

Insects and other small creeping creatures can’t speak to each other across the species, but they can make crude signals. I mean, one kind of creature can tell from another’s behaviour if there’s danger, for instance.

Now Harry stopped helplessly running around, and looked through the clear wall. Not far away from him was another hard-air prison. And in it was something he recognised.

He recognised it because it was very like what he’d eaten for breakfast.

It was a beetle, a large one. Not a stag beetle. A dung beetle, a female. Dung beetles are only happy when they have a ball of dung to roll along. This dung beetle didn’t. She had some earth in the bottom of her prison but it wasn’t dung, and she hadn’t the heart to roll it into a ball. Anyway, there was nowhere to roll it to.

She just sat forlornly with her six legs bent and her large head lowered. She looked to Harry like two things at once: a sad lady beetle and a good meal. He didn’t know which came first, but as he was still quite full of one of her distant relations, he decided to treat her as a fellow prisoner.

It was she who’d signalled to him. The signal said something like, “This is bad and I am sad.” (Beetles talk, and signal, in Beetle, a language that always rhymes. Of course Harry didn’t grasp this, just the general meaning – I’ve translated from Beetle as best I can.)

Harry signalled back, “Same here.”

She swayed her head from side to side. Then she moved forward and raised herself clumsily and put her front feet on the hard-air. This said, as clearly as words, “There is no doubt, I can’t get out.”

Harry rose up against the wall nearest to her, putting his front eight pairs of feet against it. “Me neither.”

The lady dung beetle swung her head in a wider arc. “None of us can. Have you a plan?”

Harry looked around. And got another shock.

There were lots of prisons made of the hard-air stuff! Harry couldn’t count, but if he could, he would have counted ten or twelve glass jars on the table where his was. Each one contained a prisoner.

There was a yellow scorpion, nearly as large as Harry, with pincers a lot larger (though his poison was in his tail, just now lying dejectedly behind him). There was a rhinoceros beetle, his big curved horn resting against the prison wall.

There were several caterpillars of different sizes and colours. There were two or three millipedes, a large, hairy tarantula, and several smaller spiders. There was a stick insect, which looked very unhappy indeed – it could hardly stand up straight, and besides, it didn’t have any sticks to hide amongst. Harry looked at all of them and took in their signals. All of the signals were sad and frightened.

And then he stiffened. Down at the far end, there was another centipede!

If centipedes could gasp, Harry would have gasped when he saw him.

It was George!

“Grndd! Grndd!” Harry crackled. But his crackle didn’t go through the hard-air.

Harry began to run around his prison frantically sending signals. The movement attracted the attention of all the prisoners. The ones who were lying on the floor of their jars, some sleeping, some just slumped in despair, stood up and turned his way. His turns, his twists, his liftings and scrabblings of his front feet on the wall, made all the others think something was up.

A sort of current, or wordless message, passed from jar to jar. The dung beetle passed it to the scorpion, who passed it with a curving of his poison-tail to the rhinoceros beetle, who bumped his horn against the glass with a loud click, alerting the caterpillars, who wrigglingly passed it to the tarantula.

She hugged the air with her furry front legs urgently. This passed the message to the other spiders in their own language, and their scuttlings and jumpings passed it to the stick insect.

He was so depressed he couldn’t be bothered to pass it on, but by that time it didn’t matter. George had already grasped the fact that someone was trying to signal to him. He peered through his own glass wall and, though it was far away, he could just about make out some centipedish movements, which he recognised at once as Harry’s.

(Centipedes might look all alike to you, but believe me, they can tell each other apart as easily as you can tell your mother from your worst enemy at school.)

“Hx! Hx! They got you, too! Hx, we’ve got to get out!” signalled George, twisting and turning frenziedly.

Harry picked this up with some difficulty and stood still. He thought about it for a moment and then, slowly and deliberately, he sent this signal:

“Can you tunnel through this hard-air stuff?”

George signalled: “No, and nor can any of the others. There was a mole cricket here before, and he couldn’t.” The centis knew all about mole crickets. They were among the best tunnel-diggers in the earth.

“What happened to him?”

George lowered his head and sent a brief signal.

“Stopped.”

No creature likes to think about death. They all have words for it that soften its meaning, the way we say “passed away”. But Harry had to ask.

“Did the Not-So-Big Hoo-Min stop him?”

“No. He just stopped. He – he’d been here a long time. He wouldn’t eat. He didn’t want to go on moving.”

Harry shuddered all along his cuticle. Could anything so awful happen to him and George?

4. Captivity (#ulink_b3ddf3d1-3ab3-5da9-b1b3-b80581810bea)

There followed a long, long time of misery. Sheer misery.

Being in prison is horrible for anyone – or anything. Every creature alive hates it. But some prisons are worse than others.

The Not-So-Big Hoo-Min probably thought he was treating the creatures in his collection quite well. But he wasn’t much of an expert, really. He liked catching things, and then keeping them to look at, but unfortunately he didn’t read much. So instead of studying in books how to look after his captive creatures, he just did what he thought was right.

He wanted them to stay alive, so he put some earth into their jars (but not enough to tunnel in), and sometimes some leaves and twigs and things to make them feel more at home.

He did give them water (which was just as well for Harry and George, as centipedes need to keep damp). But his idea about food was that all insects and other creepy things ate each other. So what he did was, he caught flies, or cockroaches (of which there were so many in his house he didn’t bother adding them to his collection) or else dug into ants’ or termites’ nests. Nearly every day he brought a whole mess of ants or termites and their eggs into his room on a shovel, and with the help of a large spoon, dumped them, along with bits of their nests, into the glass jars. Usually right on top of the prisoner underneath.

This was fairly all right for Harry and George, though they got a bit tired of eating the same thing every day. But for the caterpillars, who ate leaves, and only the leaves they liked at that, it was starvation time, and all but one of them stopped. (The one that didn’t stop, stopped in another way: it turned into a pupa. George and Harry agreed that that caterpillar was lucky. Fast asleep and out of it.)

The stopping of the caterpillars made all the other creatures – including those who would gladly have eaten the poor caterpillars, under ordinary circumstances – really angry with the Not-So-Big Hoo-Min.

“It keeps us here in woe and fear, so feed us good is what it should!” signalled the lady dung beetle angrily. She wouldn’t eat the ants, or their eggs, or the flies either – what she liked was dung and all the tasty bits of seed that it contained, and she was having a pretty thin time.

Harry, scoffing cockroaches and termites’ eggs, felt uneasy about her. To tell the truth, though he felt a little odd about it since he’d been brought up to think of her as food, he was getting to like her. It wasn’t very nice to think of waking up one night to find her on her back with her six legs in the air.

He and George signalled endlessly about how to escape.

They remembered the earth-pile that had helped them get Up the Up-Pipe. They piled the earth and remains of ants’ nests against the clear walls of their prisons, and tried to climb up it. But the lids were firmly in place and the holes in them were too small to creep through.

“We’ll just have to stick it out,” Harry signalled to George. “At least we’ve got enough to eat.”

“We’ll get out somehow!” said George staunchly.

These signals, which some of the others picked up, had a cheering effect. Even the stick-insect sat up and grabbed a fly.